What is the crowd's opinion of jamovi?

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There are a few different things going on here.

For your first question you don't really need to do any statistics unless I'm confused about what you're asking. The assignment with the biggest point total is the one that effects the final grade the most. I'm not really sure what else you would need than the proportion of points each assignment accounts for.

You could use an exploratory factor analysis to see if there are different latent factors (i.e., are the assignments all actually assessing skills in the same domain or multiple domains) but to do EFA well you will need to do a good bit of reading/learning first.

Further I would honestly suggest a k-means cluster analysis for the second ask here. A cluster analysis basically is an EFA for identifying groups of people rather than latent factors that are the common cause of observed variables. So you tell it which variables to use for classification and then it uses an algorithm to identify groups of people that are alike ("clusters") on the basis of the set of classifying variables used. You then investigate the "levels" of each of the classification variables in each cluster to see what the real differences are.

You could do both an EFA and a cluster analysis in jamovi (free! - https://jamovi.org) if you don't have the software. You will need to get the "SnowCluster" module (also free) to do the cluster analysis.

R is more beginner friendly and is actually open source. I know SAS too and I hated it after learning R.

If the coding is tripping you up there are GUIs out there. I would suggest not using SPSS just because it is quite expensive depending on how you get it. Instead I would suggest other open source GUIs like jamovi and JASP. These two programs specifically are GUIs for R and they can be set to produce the R syntax resulting from your point and click actions. Well worth a try!!

I have a strong-ish preference for jamovi - https://jamovi.org

>rs to get started with statistics. It is a radical redesign that's currently in beta. This is why we would like to gather as much feedback as possible in order to make it the best tool to use for all of you. Feel free to contact me directly if you have any questions.

cough

Do you really need to use minitab though?

jamovi and jasp are free and very easy to use, graphics look pretty good too

jamovi.org

https://jasp-stats.org

I'm a linguistics student teaching himself statistics, and I'm reading Statistics in Plain English by Timothy Urdan and finding it very helpful. It's more on the theoretical side, but with lots of concrete examples. My plan is to follow this one up with Learning Statistics with R by Danielle Navarro in order to learn the practical side of things. It uses the R statistical programming language, which might not be something you'd feel comfortable using, in which case I think Learning Statistics with Jamovi, coauthored by the same author based on the R version of the book could be useful to you. Jamovi is a graphical interface for R, seems fairly easy to use and comprehensive.